Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism by Sarah L. Silkey (review)

Lynching and the life of antilynching activist Ida B. Wells have received ample attention from historians, but Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism offers a new transatlantic dimension to the current scholarship. The book explores public discourse about mob violence in Great Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on Wells’s two antilynching campaigns in Great Britain in the early 1890s. Sarah L. Silkey contends that these campaigns deserve new consideration, and she offers an in-depth discussion of Wells’s reform networks, arguments, tactics, and global impact on the debate about lynching. Wells faced great resistance to her antilynching activism from white Americans, but in Great Britain Wells established herself as a “‘black lady reformer’” presenting the truth about mob violence (p. 4). Wells asserted that mob violence was not caused by black men raping white women, as white southerners maintained, but that it was animated by racism and the need to preserve white supremacy. Many Britons came to accept Wells’s race-based explanation for mob violence, motivating antilynching activism in Great Britain and forcing Americans to contend with this critique on an international stage.

Drawing on newspaper coverage from both sides of the Atlantic, Silkey demonstrates that Wells’s British campaigns not only amplified her voice but also transformed transatlantic discourse about lynching. This transformation was possible because Britons accepted Wells as an “appropriate and ladylike” truth-teller who was pushed to action out of necessity and the desire to protect the public welfare (p. 78). Wrapped in the regard this status conferred, Wells managed to push the limits of public propriety and speak about brutal violence and interracial sex. Although Wells’s campaigns in Great Britain were not without struggle, many of the obstacles she faced were internal to British activist networks. Eventually, Wells did win substantial support from the British press, igniting a national discussion. Public outcry then motivated letter-writing campaigns and petitions to U.S. politicians and the formation of the London Anti-Lynching Committee, which sent a delegation overseas to investigate mob violence.

While it is clear that Wells helped create momentum for antilynching activism in Great Britain in the 1890s and elicited strong responses from southern politicians, how to evaluate the impact of Wells’s campaigns and British antilynching efforts is challenging. The brutality of publicized lynchings and the perception that Americans were flouting due process in favor of mob rule created negative press for the United States, which southern leaders and concerned individuals sought to combat. Through newspapers at home and abroad, white southerners defended their regard for justice and worked to educate the British on the “true” reason for lynching: the rape of white women. While these responses show American engagement with British antilynching discourse, Silkey also suggests that British criticism was directly responsible for subtler shifts in the way white southerners justified and managed mob violence. But this assertion is difficult for Silkey to prove because of the tumultuous domestic landscape of the United States in the 1890s. Additionally, British antilynching efforts ultimately elicited a prolific backlash, shifting the focus from the causes of mob violence itself and motivating the defensive retrenchment of lynching apologists. Wells eventually realized that her British campaigns had yielded little measurable gain, leaving her a lone crusader, unable to rally support for an African American–led antilynching campaign.

While mob violence would persist, Wells’s arguments influenced lynching discourse for decades to come, and her British campaigns forced Americans to contemplate the price of lynching on the international stage. Through an exploration of British perspectives on lynching, Black Woman Reformer broadens the scope of what is typically viewed as a distinctly southern phenomenon.